Happy New Year to you all, I hope you had a lovely time.

We’ve been straight back to our normal routine this week and are ready for an exciting term.

Topic

We had a puzzle to solve on Monday morning to find out what our new topic was going to be.. we each had a piece of a puzzle and without talking we had to find our group and make up our puzzle. Each puzzle created a picture of a clue to what our topic was going to be..

the answer was… Scotland!

Lots of us have been bringing in Scottish books and objects to share with the class.

We started off our topic by thinking about all of the Scottish cities that we know. (Hopefully we all now realise that Union Square is not a city.. :/ ) We discussed the position of these cities on a map and spoke about cities that are up/down from Aberdeen and the time it takes us to get there. We were able to use this knowledge to help us plot the cities on a map.  We could use atlases to help us too. Throughout the rest of the week Miss Dow has been testing us and asking us to mark the different cities on the Interactive Whiteboard from memory.

We have also been learning about some Scottish myths and legends such as the Loch Ness Monster and Kelpies. In small groups, we had to use an information sheet to create a poster to teach other people about the myth we had been given. We had to include facts and pictures and make sure our poster was bright and eye-catching.

2019 Wishes

We had to think about our school resolutions/targets. We spoke about areas of maths and literacy that we wish to improve and work on this year/term. Some of us also had time to think about some wishes for at home – lots of children are wishing to be more helpful at home with cooking and cleaning their bedrooms! We wrote our wishes on a coin so that we could drop them into our wishing well on our wall display in the classroom.

Maths

We started by revising o’clock, half past, quarter to and quarter past times.

We have been continuing with ‘time’ in maths this week. Some of us have been using a rhyme and our knuckles to work out how many days are in each month of the year.

We have been playing matching games to help us. We have also been thinking about the order of the months and what months happen in each season.

On Thursday we were thinking about measurements of time – hours, days, seconds etc. When Miss Dow said ‘start!’ we had to count up to 60 seconds and stand up when we thought a minute was up. Some of us stood up as early as 40 seconds and some of us were standing up as late as 2 minutes! We learned some words we can use to help us count in seconds (elephant, mississippi etc) and then we were set a 1 minute challenge.

We had to work with a partner and use a 1 minute egg timer to see how many repetitions of an action we could do in a minute! We had to record our predictions before we could test if we were correct or not. Our predictions improved as we progressed through the sheet. The actions included things like burpees, writing our name, star jumps and even saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as many times as we could!! As you can see from the photos, we had lots of fun but were very tired by the end of it…

Art

This week we have been creating our own art in the style of a famous artist and designer, using his work as our inspiration. Since our topic is Scotland we focussed on a scottish artist – Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We learned a bit about his life and the fact he was an architect living in Glasgow. We know that some tea rooms he designed are now in the V&A Museum in Dundee. We noticed that his work is quite simple and uses a lot of basic shapes and a lot of lines. We realised that he uses a little bit of colour and that he is famous for his Celtic-looking roses. Our art work we produced was incredible – we definitely have some budding artists in our midst.

Circle Time

In Circle Time this week we were talking about when little things happen outside in the playground and in the class. We spoke about being able to ignore some small things if they are not very serious. We had to think about things that you would need to tell Miss Dow and things that you do not need to tell Miss Dow. We were given an example and had to use our hands to make a T if the example was a ‘tale’ and an S if the example was ‘serious’ and necessary to tell Miss Dow. This will be something we have to think about when something happens within our friendship groups in the future.